Right Stuff the Mercury Seven

Right Stuff The Mercury Seven astronauts are familiar to most. These astronauts were chosen among many to participate in the NASA's Mercury Project and are who Tom Wolfe's book titled the Right Stuff is based on. There are probably several causal arguments which can be found in this book. In order to focus on one such argument for the purpose of this paper, the term causal argument must first be defined. A simple definition of a causal argument is that one event causes another event to happen.

An example of this would be if a woman wears high heels and walks in them all day, the soles of her feet will hurt. So, walking in high heels all day would be the cause of the woman's hurting feet. In Wolfe's book the Right Stuff, the fact that the seven astronauts met the strict criteria that NASA was looking for is why they were chosen to be the first men in the United States travel into outer space.

The superior qualities possessed by the initial seven astronauts are what caused their trips to space to be successful and is also the cause of NASA being the successful program that it is today. NASA would not have been able to accomplish all that is has to date had it settle on men who were mediocre to make the first flights into space.

The Mercury Project was created by NASA to send men to into outer space to find out if humans could function on a different planet other than earth. Wolfe describes in his book how military pilots during the 1950's were generally considered fearless. According to him, they were top notch and had no fear of dying. They performed their duties each time knowing that they always faced the possibility of death, yet their performances were always outstanding. Not everyone chosen to be a military pilot had these qualities.

The author states that at the beginning of each class of new recruits, they were told upfront that the majority of them would not make it (25). In the beginning, NASA's guidelines for choosing the Mercury Seven were strict, but not extremely strict. They were basically looking for anyone that was a military test pilot. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower saw the initial criteria, he was not in favor of it because he knew that the response would be overwhelming.

As a result of this, he suggested a more stringent set of guidelines. He did this because the Mercury Project was special, extremely important and would become a major part of history. Therefore, he suggested NASA tighten up the criteria so that only a few elite would qualify.

The new criteria set forth required that the chosen seven possess the following: candidates could be no taller than five feet eleven inches, they must possess a college degree (or its equivalent), they could not be older than forty and they could weigh no more than 180 pounds (Wolfe 76). The pool of qualified candidates immediately dropped from a little over five hundred to less than seventy. Of this number, many were eliminated because they could not endure the various physical and mental tests and the medical exams required.

The number finally dwindled down and seven astronauts who are today known as the Mercury Seven were chosen. The Mercury Seven consisted of Alan Shepard Jr., Virgil Grissom, John Glenn Jr., Malcolm Carpenter, Walter Schirra Jr., Leroy Cooper Jr., and Donald Slayton. We are familiar with cause and effect and causal arguments. This being the case, it is undeniable that the mercury astronauts possessed special qualities that caused them to be chosen for the Mercury Project.

NASA only needed a few qualified men for this project and had they stayed with the original criteria, it is possible that they might have chosen men that met some or most of the guidelines, but not exceeded them all as the seven astronauts did. Also, if they held onto the original guidelines they would not have had a class of candidates, such as the Mercury Seven for these astronauts proved that being a military test pilot was not enough.

Anyone taking on such an important assignment as being one of the first to travel in space had to outshine others. The seven astronauts chosen were able to stand above all the rest and pass all necessary tests in order to be chosen. It is a good thing that the criteria were revised since shortly before the first of the seven astronauts (Alan Shepard, Jr.) was to make the suborbital trip into space, it was discovered that.